Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga’s once-expensive precursor, is out now on XBLA

Radiant Silvergun is legendary for being both rare, expensive, and very …

Radiant Silvergun was a shooter from Treasure that came before Ikaruga, and until now it was only available as an import title for the Sega Saturn. If you were lucky enough to find a copy, you would be paying a few hundred dollars for the honor of playing. The high price and rarity of the game are somewhat legendary, but now anyone with an Xbox 360 and $15 can buy an updated version of this shooter to see what hardcore fans have been raving about for years.

The game features updated graphics—although the ability to play with the original aesthetics is available—along with a number of options for difficulty and online co-op play. It's nothing flashy, but this release is a good example of how to make modern gamers happy while not annoying the purists.

That being said, the game is weird. The game's dialog in story mode is in spoken Japanese with subtitles, with no options for English voice-overs. While most shooters ask you to master a few different weapons or ships, Radiant Silvergun gives you access to seven different guns from the jump. It's tricky to remember which button fires what type of gun, and figuring out the best weapon to use against each enemy, boss, or even environment is going to take a good amount of practice. The game can feel overwhelming at first, and it doesn't do much to welcome you. It's not a shooter for newbies.

You'll also be able to level each weapon by using it against enemies, and you can speed up this process by attacking only one color of enemy ship at a time to buff your score—a concept that should be familiar to Ikaruga players. I often found myself using weapons against the easier levels and bosses that weren't optimal simply to gain power for later challenges. The amount of information you need to take in and the number of decisions you need to make about what enemies to attack is, again, overwhelming.

Still, the game is beautifully designed, if somewhat relentless. Even if you were just curious about this well-known but rarely played game, it may be worth picking up. The collectors may be crying into their mint copies of the game, but the rest of us are happy that this piece of gaming history is now widely available.

Radiant Silvergun is available now on the Xbox Live Arcade for 1200 points, or $15.